Where marketing is not done by wagon the subject of railroad transportation is practically identical with the question of marketing.  It is the cost in freight service and freight rates that count.  The proposition of transportation, especially for the grain buying poultry farm, catches us coming and going and both must be considered.

A poultry farm in Section 7 will buy one hundred pounds of feed per year per hen and market one-third of a case of eggs.  On this basis the grain rate from Chicago or St. Louis and the egg rate to New York must be balanced against each other.  Don’t take these things for granted.  Look them up.

Jamesburg and Freehold, two New Jersey towns ten miles apart and equi-distant and with equal freight rates from New York, might seem to the uninitiated as equally well situated to poultry farming.  We will suppose two men bought forty-acre farms of equal quality and equi-distant from the railroad stations at these two towns.  Suppose, further, they each kept five thousand hens.  Jamesburg is on a Philadelphia-New York line of the Pennsylvania and its Chicago grain rate is the same as that of New York, namely:  19-1/2 cents per hundred.  Freehold is on a branch line; its rate is 24-1/2 cents.  In a year the difference amounts to $250.  Figured at six per cent. interest, the land at Jamesburg is worth just about one hundred dollars an acre more than that at Freehold.

Lumber rates or local lumber prices should also be taken into consideration.  Whether one plans to ship his product out by express or freight will, of course, be an important consideration in deciding the location.

As a general thing, the individual poultry farmer will, for shipping his product, use express east of Buffalo and north of Norfolk.  The poultry community could use freight in these same regions and get as good or better service than by express.

The location in relation to the railroad station is equally important to the freight rate.  Besides heavy hauling frequent trips will be necessary in marketing eggs.  These on the larger farms will be daily or at least semi-weekly.  On the heavy hauling alone, at 25 cents per ton mile, distance from the railroad will figure up 1-1/4 cents per hen which, on the basis of the previous illustration, would make a difference of twenty-five dollars per acre for every mile of distance from the station.  One of the most successful poultry farms I know is right along the railroad and has an elevator which handles the grain from the cars and later dumps it into the feed wagons without its ever being touched by hand.  The labor saving in this counts up rapidly.

The poultry community can have its own elevator and the grain can be sold to the farmer to be delivered directly into the hoppers in his field with but a single loading into a wagon.

Availability of Water.

One more point to be considered in location is water.